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Who is Marvin K. Mooney?

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Let Us All Stop What We’re Doing for a Minute to Recognize the Awesomeness of Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert has apparently been blogging for the Chicago Sun-Times. Who knew–or cared? I would have said “not me.” But then a friend forwarded me this post of Ebert’s about losing the ability–over the course of his battle with cancer–to eat and speak. “Nil by Mouth” is an incredible piece of writing. Ebert begins by detailing his situation, but the piece quickly becomes a meditation on memory, experience, repetition and loss. It’s an astonishing and impressive piece of writing. Will I go so far as to call it a Proustian reverie? Why the heck not?

I dreamed. I was reading Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree, and there’s a passage where the hero, lazing on his river boat on a hot summer day, pulls up a string from the water with a bottle of orange soda attached to it and drinks. I tasted that pop so clearly I can taste it today. Later he’s served a beer in a frosted mug. I don’t drink beer, but the frosted mug evoked for me a long-buried memory of my father and I driving in his old Plymouth to the A&W Root Beer stand (gravel driveways, carhop service, window trays) and his voice saying “…and a five-cent beer for the boy.” The smoke from his Lucky Strike in the car. The heavy summer heat.For nights I would wake up already focused on that small but heavy glass mug with the ice sliding from it, and the first sip of root beer. I took that sip over and over. The ice slid down across my fingers again and again. But never again.

It’s a long piece. But my guess is that once you start it, you won’t want to stop. Also, this apparently wasn’t just a one-off strike of awesome. I’m now deeply immersed in the most recent post, “Making Out is its Own Reward,” in which Ebert remembers the days of universities acting in loco parentis with regard to attempting to enforce student-abstinence, the first time he ever saw a gay kiss in real life, and a whole host of other fascinating memories and bits of half-lost history. He tops things off with a selection of YouTube videos about how to kiss, how to make out, and related concerns. In the clip below, two Asian girls sitting on a flight of stairs teach you how to make a move in a movie theater.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMcI5eMs1JY&

Roger Ebert! Our awareness of your awesomeness is belated, and we apologize. We will be paying attention from now on. Cheers!

Author Spotlight / 19 Comments
January 16th, 2010 / 1:33 pm

Lists

1.) Lists fascinate.

5.) A new review of Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists.

Inside is a Chinese encyclopedia created by Borges. Inside the encyclopedia:

There the world’s animals are divided into “(a) those that belong to the emperor; (b) embalmed ones; (c) those that are trained; (d) suckling pigs; (e) mermaids; (f) fabulous ones; (g) stray dogs; (h) those that are included in this classification; (i) those that tremble as if they were mad; (j) innumerable ones; (k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s-hair brush; (l) etcetera; (m) those that have just broken the flower vase; (n) those that at a distance resemble flies.”

3.) Somewhere sinks a cruise ship named Fun with Puns.

10.) Lists shimmer in their making. Like the distance run, or Yeat’s dancer (also the dance) the list is its own doing/undoing. The runner and the run the same, a cloud, a tributary, an experience and an artifact. The making doesn’t wait for a list to appear; the list is the making and the thing. The list is the listing is the list.

READ MORE >

Random / 4 Comments
January 16th, 2010 / 12:20 pm

This Week I Began Studying The Posthuman

What is the posthuman? Think of it as a point of view characterized by the following assumptions…First, the posthuman view privileges informational pattern over material instantiation, so that embodiment in a biological substrate is seen as an accident of history rather than an inevitability of life. Second, the posthuman view considers consciousness, regarded as the seat of human identity in the Western tradition long before Descartes thought he was a mind thinking, as an epiphenomenon, as an evolutionary upstart trying to claim that it is the whole show when in actuality it is only a minor sideshow. Third, the posthuman view thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that extending or replacing the body with other prostheses becomes a continuation of a process that began before we were born. Fourth, and most important, by these and other means, the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot technology and human goals.

–from N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1999)

“A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction…The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century…Though both are bound in the spiral dance, I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess.”

–from Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991)

Random / 40 Comments
January 15th, 2010 / 6:48 pm
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Paige Williams, a journalist, wrote a fascinating story about Dolly Freed–author of the off-grid classic Possum Living which has been reissued by Tin House this month. Paige self-published the story after many rejections and is accepting donations. I chipped in. I’m sure you’ll want to, too. ::: Tom McCarthy, author of remainder, on David Lynch’s films. Excellent thoughts. ::: And a half-good, half-Wall-Street-Journal Wall Street Journal piece on the state of the slush pile.

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“You have to develop a feel for it, in your body, as you’re feeling the letters. ‘Everything you’re doing is behind you.'”

Dreaming of writing a breezy pocketbook bestseller called HOW TO HAVE FUN WITH CONTEMPORARY NONSENSE, I had my dream thankfully interrupted by the discovery of the mighty Ron Padgett’s Creative Reading (1997), which is sort of a better, richer, funnier, and broader version of my idea, involving a lot less instances of the phrase “Derridian play as model for invisible friendship” (yeah, I know, sorry in advance, hypothetical sorry, snow sorry, slur saw reed) and a lot more about how strange and terrific all reading can be. And how meeting up with that fact makes you a better reader and enables you to have fun with all kinds of reading, even the nonsense. Best of all, Padgett’s book is available for free by clicking the link above. It includes lots of great, clear and easy-gaited strategies for messing around with the stuff you read, which makes it an ideal text for teaching and/or quoting in the presence of family members who have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about, ever. It’s full of poems, tidbits, cut-ups, cool stuff. It’s basically about letting your mind be playful and less scared. Less scared of nonsense and of the nonsense at the root of language’s conceit, the ticklish arbitrariness of all abstract communication. Here is a blurb:

After a brief discussion of common reading errors that can be used creatively, the central chapter of the book, “Creative Reading Techniques,” suggests exercises that make reading an adventure, highly interactive, and imaginative, using both classic and modern literature in ways that blend reading and writing. Along the way, among other things, the book talks about the influence of typography, movies, and television on reading, the joys of misunderstanding, the music of Spike Jones, skywriting, Dada poetry, reading in dreams, the way words sound in the reader’s head, and the setting in which text is read.

There’s also an awesome appendix about skywriting. Tell me if this doesn’t remind you of anything:

Behind the Scenes & Excerpts / 8 Comments
January 15th, 2010 / 5:54 pm

Friday Fuck Books, Let’s Take Us Some Teeth

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6bK5EPdQ1g

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=toSWqyvpkYo

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qY1lHDXw6GM

Isaiah Toothtaker‘s record is free HERE. The first track samples Werner Herzog.

Random & Web Hype / 10 Comments
January 15th, 2010 / 4:58 pm
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Today at Viceland, a chance to get another look at Michael Kimball’s excellent book, Dear Everybody.

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This year-old “Quarterlife Crisis” meme article just stressed me the fuck out.  Even though the whole “I’m in my 20s and I don’t know what I want to do with my life” thing doesn’t quite apply to obsessive writer types, does it?  The problem for us is we know exactly what we want to do and we spend all our time doing it because we like to do it, but it’s not exactly a viable “career.”  So for us the question is… what the fuck is going to happen to us when we get old?  Where are you going to be when you’re old? Publishing flash fiction downloaded directly into the brains of ten people worldwide?

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Ok Don B. freaks…

or ?

Random / 56 Comments
January 15th, 2010 / 2:01 pm